Jailbreak

Cydia

Coming to the scene in an attempt to make controlling our iDevices simpler is a jailbreak widget dubbed NCSwipe by Ron Melkhior. The widget is intended to be a control center for iOS located in Notification Center. This permits you to use Notification Center to perform actions such as respring, control volume, control brightness, play and pause music, and much more. Obviously, this is more convenient to do than scavenge through applications to do these things.

Everything starts with pre-judgment. After first-looks, the cosmetic appearance of the widget is frankly disturbing and doesn’t feel like it has any place in Notification Center. Strangely enough, even though the icon in the widget gives the appearance that it can be swiped in all four directions, NCSwipe only has settings for swiping right and left. I was unable to get NCSwipe to work until I uninstalled IntelliScreenX – pointing out an obvious incompatibility and a large one at that.

The preferences for NCSwipe are rather simple, however they are also extensive. Beginning with the first pane, we can choose to enable or disable gestures for swiping left and right or for tapping the widget. Below the switches are areas that we can actually select what we want NCSwipe to do subsequent to invoking the gestures. Tapping on one of them brings up the long list of options we can make that gesture do:

Many of the features that we discover in this section of NCSwipe’s settings are things that we can find SBSettings toggles for. You can enable more than one of these features per NCSwipe action that you invoke from the widget. For instance, if you turn on both increase brightness and increase volume for swiping to the right, then both the brightness and volume will increase when you swipe right. The whole list of features is as follows:

Respring

Reboot

Open URL

Toggle Wi-Fi

Increase volume

Decrease volume

Toggle mute

Increase brightness

Decrease brightness

Toggle airplane mode

Toggle music

Next track

Previous track

Lock device

While it seems to work fine, the appearance of the widget has a lot to be desired, which makes the whole point in using it nearly pointless for many. Someone will find the functionality to be beneficial to them, but with growing popularity for Siri extensions and great toggle platforms such as SBSettings and IntelliScreenX, I find this class of control for iOS to be unnecessary. In addition, Notification Center can only handle so many widgets before it starts to slug down and lag, so widgets should be chosen selectively and carefully.

NCSwipe requires iOS 5 and will install a dependency called WeeLoader. You can enable and disable the widget at any time, like all widgets, by going to the Notifications preferences in the Settings application and dragging the widget in and out of Notification Center. NCSwipe is free, so give it a try.